Testing in the manufacturing environment changed significantly in recent years. Previously, research and development groups would take appropriate steps to provide a proven product to the manufacturing facility for production. However, due to time-to-market constraints, this is no longer acceptable. One key to producing successful products is now being the earliest to market. As a result, research and development departments have been forced to deliver products faster to the manufacturing facility, which in turn introduces risk to quality.
To accommodate this situation, manufacturing facilities have set up different schemes for qualifying new products to ensure high quality. In general, more work is done up-front with the research and development group to ensure enough margin for manufacturing processes as well as the testing philosophy. Further, products are often taken after functionality testing processes have been done and run through a test environment similar to that in which they will be used by customers. This is done to ensure that customers receive a quality product and do not become the evaluation area for the product.
In order to accomplish customer environment testing, changes have been made to ensure that the manufacturing facility is flexible and can handle different issues that may arise. The customer setup is used and tested to ensure that major issues are seen before they are discovered by customers. One important part of this customer environment testing is to qualify new products at temperature extremes. For this reason, telecommunications equipment is often tested at both cold and hot extreme temperatures.
In the past, temperature testing has been accomplished by building a custom chamber for holding the telecommunications equipment. In this scheme, the testing equipment is built as a custom test chamber around each set of equipment which is temperature tested. Generally, such chambers are costly (e.g., in the range of $200,000) to build and install. Once completed, these chambers allow testing at both cold and hot temperature extremes in a process that generally takes 48 hours to complete.